Toxicity by System of a Down

Toxicity, the second System of a Down album, came out on American Recordings and Columbia on September 4, 2001, and it's a much bigger and weirder beast than their 1998 debut. Rick Rubin produced it at Cello Studios in Hollywood, where the band cut more than 30 songs before paring the list down to 14. What survived packs more melody, more harmony and more actual singing than before, without giving up an inch of chaos.

This is alternative metal that won't sit still. The riffs lurch and stutter, the vocals switch from operatic wails to machine-gun yammering, and in between you get bits of folk, progressive rock, jazz and Armenian and Greek music, with sitar, banjo, keyboards and piano all sneaking into the mix. "Chop Suey!" whiplashes from frantic to mournful and back, the title track rolls in on a big, swinging groove, "Aerials" builds into something like a psychedelic hymn, and "Psycho" is sleazy and sneering. The subjects run from mass incarceration, the CIA, the environment and police brutality to drug addiction and groupies.

The album went straight to number one on the Billboard 200 and in Canada, moving 220,000 copies in its first week, and every single it spawned made the Hot 100. "Aerials" hit number one on both the Mainstream Rock and Modern Rock charts. Critics raved, and it has since sold at least seven million copies in the US.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.